Understanding IBM's Mainframe Monopoly
March 25, 2009 OpenMainframe.org Research Report (Revised March 25, 2009)
Initially open systems were established around technology based on the UNIX operating system from AT&T. Instead of having a proprietary operating system for one manufacturer’s platform, UNIX was ported to multiple platforms and quickly emerged as a standard operating system that offered portability of application code and IT skills across systems from multiple manufacturers such as Sun, IBM, NCR, AT&T, DEC, Hewlett-Packard and others.
As personal computer technology became powerful enough to run server-based, multi-user applications, operating systems emerged to allow the execution of business applications – although on a smaller scale than what was possible on a mainframe or UNIX mini-computer. UNIX was ported to the Intel platform and other network-oriented server operating systems from Novell and Microsoft came to market in the 1990s. The popular Open Source Linux operating system came to life and also gradually emerged as a viable option for certain classes of server computing.
It appeared that healthy market forces were in play and customers were benefiting – however not all vendors in the business server market were playing by the rules.
IBM saw the potential for volume business server computing using Linux, UNIX and Windows-based systems (LUW servers) but it also saw the huge profits that could be extracted from customers locked in the old world of proprietary systems.
While the IBM mainframe was increasingly less appealing for new customers’ needs, existing mainframe customers found themselves locked into the application interfaces on the mainframe and found it difficult to move to other more modern, lower-cost platforms. And yet, these customers needed additional computing resources so were forced to continue to buy IBM mainframes for this class of proprietary legacy applications.
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